Christians and Scientists: New Light
for Creationism

By Laurie Goodstein

IN a startling about-face, the National Association
of Biology Teachers, which had long stood firm against religious
fundamentalists who insisted that creationism be taught in public
schools, recently excised two key words from its platform on teaching
evolution.

"The diversity of life on earth,"
the group's platform used to read, "is the outcome of evolution:
an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process."
Now the crucial words "unsupervised" and "impersonal"
have been dropped. The revision is clearly designed to allow for
the possibility that a Master Hand was at the helm.

This surprising change in creed for
the nation's biology teachers is only one of many signs that the
proponents of creationism, long stereotyped as anti-intellectual
Bible-thumpers, have new allies and the hope of new credibility.

The old breed of creationists consists
of Biblical literalists for whom Genesis is the ideal textbook.
They believe that God created the Earth in six days a few thousand
years ago a position hard to maintain in the face of carbon dating.
Active in their cause, the most vocal among them are affiliated
with marginal groups like the Institute for Creation Research
and Answers in Genesis, and find their audiences in conservative
evangelical churches and on Christian radio. And though they call
their field "creation science," they have been met with
ridicule by scientists, and with embarrassment by most evangelical
Christian intellectuals.

The new creationists, however, are
Christian intellectuals, and some of them are even scientists.
They hold faculty positions not at Bible colleges but at public
and secular universities. They do not dispute that the planet
is ancient. But they are promoting the idea that living organisms
and the universe are so impossibly complex that the only plausible
conclusion is that an omniscient creator designed it all on purpose.

The concept of "intelligent design"
is not new, and even predates Darwinism. But it is getting a hearing
in all sorts of mainstream settings, from lecture halls to scholarly
journals to a "Firing Line" debate airing this week
on PBS. William F. Buckley Jr. (a Roman Catholic whose church
last year issued a message from the Pope reiterating the basic
Catholic approach that evolution and belief in God are compatible)
argues, "A lot of monkeys turned loose over an infinite number
of times could not, would not, reproduce Shakespeare." Propelling
this Scopes redux is a cluster of energetic evangelical academics
who have long been resentful that American academia gives religion
no respect. In attacking evolution, some of them believe they
are knocking out the keystone in the secular wall that they say
rings America's universities.

The most unlikely of these respectable
renegades is Phillip E. Johnson, who once clerked for the liberal
Chief Justice Earl Warren and who now holds an endowed law school
chair at the University of California at Berkeley.

An Entire Culture

Since his conversion to evangelical
Christianity at the age of 37, Mr. Johnson has written three books
attacking evolution. He says he is aiming to challenge not merely
the secularism of universities but of an entire culture that he
says rests on the scientific assumption of "naturalism"
-- the idea that the natural world has no supernatural supervision.
To Mr. Johnson, evolution is the linchpin to the naturalistic
world view because it presupposes that creation was a chance development
that life could happen without God.

"Do you need a creator, a pre-existing
intelligence to get the creating done? Science has taught us you
don't. You can believe in the creator as an unnecessary add-on
if you want, but the process proceeds by itself."

Mr. Johnson presents as exhibits A,
B and C the names of scientists who acknowledge -- or boast --
that believing in evolution has logically led them to become atheists
or agnostics. In his book Reason in the Balance, Mr. Johnson
says this "scientific elite" are our modern priests
and evolution our "creation myth."

In a recent poll of 1,000 scientists,
55 percent said they believed that "God had no part in the
process" of evolution. But 40 percent said that while they
believe in evolution, "God guided the process, including
the creation of man." Mr. Johnson wants to convince these
"theistic evolutionists," who include many religious
leaders, that their straddling is untenable. Many believers find
no contradiction between the idea of a creator and evolution.
For them, it is not an either-or proposition.

The biology teachers changed their
statement, said Wayne Carley, the association's executive director,
"to avoid taking a religious position" that could offend
believers. But he said the group firmly believed "there is
no evidence of any creator having a hand in the origin of any
species." For years, the teachers resisted demands to amend
the statement. But Mr. Carley said they decided in October to
change the platform after a well-reasoned request in a letter
from two distinguished scholars: Huston Smith, professor emeritus
of religion at Berkeley, and Alvin Plantinga, a philosopher of
religion at the University of Notre Dame.

Another ally of Mr. Johnson is Michael
Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University who contends that the
molecular machinery of cells is so complex and interdependent
that this is proof of purposeful design. Mr. Behe's book, Darwin's
Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, was chosen
as 1997 Book of the Year by the evangelical monthly Christianity
Today.

Entering the fray with a recent article
in Commentary is David Berlinski, a philosopher, who asserts that
after more than 140 years the Darwinists have failed to prove
their case because major transitions are "missing from the
fossil record."

These new creationists avoid one pitfall
of their predecessors by not positing, at least publicly, the
identity of the creator. "My decision is simply to put it
off," Mr. Johnson said, "and I recommend that to others."

Mainstream Fire

This triumvirate has been duly picked
apart by mainstream scientists. Kenneth Miller, a biologist at
Brown University, argued in the "Firing Line" debate
that "the intelligent designer" was "incompetent,
because everything the intelligent designer designed, with about
one percent exceptions, has immediately become extinct."

Mr. Miller also skewered Mr. Behe's
book in a recent review. But that the book was even reviewed is
progress in Mr. Johnson's view: "This issue is getting into
the mainstream. People realize they can deal with it the way they
deal with other intellectual issues like whether socialism is
a good thing. My goal is not so much to win the argument as to
legitimate it as part of the dialogue."

The danger in the new creationism,
says Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center
for Science Education in El Cerrito, Calif., is that "there
are a lot of students going to be leaving college thinking evolution
is in crisis." With fewer and fewer high school teachers
daring to teach evolution these days, Ms. Scott said, the scientists
of the next generation "are in bad shape."